In this manner they made about fifty miles a day. Luck was with them.
There were several runaways along the route; at Port Davis, Texas,
they found the garrison, whom they had expected to supply them with
provisions according to orders from Washington, short of food, and
they subsisted for the next five days on what barley they felt
justified in taking away from the horses; they arrived at Camp
Lancaster just after the departure of a Comanche war-party who had
stolen all the stock, and were obliged to go two hundred miles further
before they could get a relay. But these incidents, and a delay or two
because of swollen rivers, were accounted only small mishaps. They
came through with their scalps and the mail-sacks--only ten days
behind the schedule.

Thereafter the Birch line continued its service; and letters came from
San Francisco to St. Louis in about six weeks. Occasionally Indians
massacred a party of travelers; now and then renegade whites or
Mexicans robbed the passengers of their belongings and looted the
mail-sacks. But such things were no more than any one expected. James
Birch had proved his point. The southern route was practical, and in
1858 the government let a six years' contract for carrying letters
twice a week between St. Louis and San Francisco, to John Butterfield
of Utica, New York.

Thus the Wells-Butterfield interests scored the first decisive
victory.

Butterfield's compensation was fixed at $600,000 a year and the
schedule at twenty-five days. The route went by way of Fort Smith,
Arkansas, El Paso, Tucson, and Jaeger's Ferry. Tie one end of a loose
string to San Francisco and the other to St. Louis on your wall-map;
allow the cord to droop in a semicircle to the Mexican boundary, and
you will see the general direction of that road, whose length was 2760
miles. Of this nearly two thousand miles was in a hostile Indian
country.

Twenty-seven hundred and sixty miles in twenty-five days, meant a
fast clip for horses and a lumbering Concord coach over ungraded
roads. And such a clip necessitated frequent relays. Which, in their
turn, demanded stations at short intervals. While a road gang was
removing the ugliest barriers in the different mountain passes--which
was all the smoothing away that highway ever got during the
stage-coach era--a party went along the line erecting adobe houses.
These houses were little forts, well suited for withstanding the
attacks of hostile Indians. The corrals bes